Trivia / Siskel & Ebert

• Channel Hop: Opening Soon...at a Theater Near You/Sneak Previews began as a local show on Chicago public station WTTW in 1975, then was picked up by PBS nationally in 1978.^note It had already been running for a few years on the Central Educational Network, the Midwestern distribution subdivision of PBS. When WTTW tried to put together a First-Run Syndication deal for Sneak Previews that would've only given Roger and Gene a relative pittance of the money the show earned, Siskel and Ebert left and cut their own syndication deal with Tribune Entertainment (owned by Siskel's employer the Chicago Tribune) for At the Movies starting in 1982. When their contract was up in 1986, Tribune stalled on setting up a renewal deal, allowing Buena Vista Television to swoop in and grab them for the variously-titled shows under the Siskel & Ebert banner over the next couple of decades. This meant that in many cities, they did indeed jump between different local channels for different incarnations of their show.
• Colbert Bump: They often featured indie movies and documentaries on their shows that otherwise wouldn't have gotten any mainstream exposure, and devoted several "Buried Treasures" specials to touting some of their favorite film obscurities. In particular, the makers of Gates of Heaven, My Dinner with Andre and Hoop Dreams all credit the success of their films to being featured on the show, where both critics raved about them.
• Corpsing: While it was customary for either Siskel or Ebert to remain silent while the other provided the initial summary and description of the movie they were reviewing, occasionally, they can be heard chuckling throughout. One of the biggest examples being when Siskel laughs multiple times through Ebert's roasting of Leonard Part 6 before it's his turn to speak.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Siskel's original review of Slap Shot was very negative, calling it a mindless movie of violence and claiming the message felt tacked-on. According to him in later interviews, he saw the movie again later on and liked it a lot more, and said that he regretted saying what he initially did about it.
  • Ebert would openly apologize several years later for giving Unforgiven a low rating.
  • In terms of the show itself, while he'd been gone by that point, Ebert was critical of the "Ben & Ben" era of At the Movies, implicitly throwing shade at the hosts in one of his columns while they were active. When they were fired, he came out in identifying that they were exactly who he was criticizing, and that while he had nothing personal against Ben Mankiewicz, he was put off by Ben Lyons' lack of qualifications for the job (having never having published a single review before he joined the show) as well as the show's general disregard for its legacy, including unceremoniously trashing their previous set.
• Executive Meddling:
  • For their review of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, they mention how Universal wouldn't provide them any footage of E.T. on-screen for their show outside of his fingers and feet in the shed scene. Instead, they had to show a picture of him.
  • For Zelig, Woody Allen wouldn't allow them to show any clips, apparently not wanting to spoil the Mockumentary illusion for any potential viewers, so they had to make do with a couple of promo stills of Allen.
  • In their review of the 1987 re-release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, they mention how Disney wouldn't provide clips of the more intense scenes of the film for their show (or to other critics) so as not to frighten young children from seeing it.
  • The same thing happened again when they reviewed the 1988 re-release of Bambi, where again they weren't allowed to show the more intense scenes of the film in their review, most notably the death of Bambi's mother.
• Follow the Leader:
  • The entire Video Review Show genre ultimately derives from Gene and Roger, so literally thousands of TV shows, web videos and podcasts count.
  • Part of the tension between the two was because Ebert considered Siskel to be this as a newspaper critic. Ebert had debuted in the Sun-Times in 1967 and became an immediate sensation as a knowledgeable young critic with a love for movies who graded films with a star-rating system. In 1969, the Tribune hired Siskel, who had a similar profile and also used star ratings, and Ebert took this as a direct challenge (which the ultra-competitive Siskel openly admitted was the case).
• Harpo Does Something Funny: Their individual bits were scripted, but big gaps were left in scripts for the crosstalk segments, which they would completely ad-lib.
• In Memoriam:
  • Ebert's tribute to Gene Siskel after his death.
  • They've also made tributes to deceased film stars and directors, usually at the end of the show. One deceased director, however, was given a full episode tribute (Stanley Kubrick).
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Due to their timely nature, reruns of Siskel and Ebert usually aren't aired on TV except occasionally their special topic episodes, and while most every review was previously available on Buena Vista's website, they were removed in 2010 when "At the Movies" was canceled. Due to both of these factors, Siskel and Ebert will never come to DVD, though a few episodes/segments have made it to DVD ("Pulp Faction: The Tarantino Generation" was released on the Pulp Fiction Blu-ray, and the Blue Velvet review was on that movie's Blu-ray release).
  • The fan site siskelandebert.org had numerous full episodes from 1975 to 2000 (as well as a few random Ebert & Roeper episodes), but was briefly inaccessible between mid-2017 and late 2018 due to financial issues related to keeping the server up. It has seen been revamped in a slightly more modest form.
  • A good chunk of episodes are on YouTube, with surprisingly few having been pulled for copyright. A few are even uploaded by the official Roger Ebert channel, such as the episode where they review Jaws: The Revenge.
• Long Runner: If one took the three separate series as one continuous series with different titles, then it's 35 years, 9/4/75-8/15/10.
• Milestone Celebration: In 1989, the duo hosted a one-hour "500th Anniversary Special".
• Missing Episode: Numerous, which is to be expected for such a long-running series. The vast majority of Opening Soon at a Theater Near You/Sneak Previews and the syndicated version of At the Movies were wiped, and although the surviving PBS episodes have been archived on the IMDb (among other websites) and home video recordings exist of hundreds of episodes across both series, there are still dozens of episodes missing.
• Real Song Theme Tune:
  • The early local Chicago incarnation (Opening Soon...at a Theater Near You) used the Billy Joel Instrumental "Root Beer Rag" as its opening theme.
  • Sneak Previews used a piece of music originally composed for an episode of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
• Referenced by...: Now has its own page.
• Similarly Named Works: The final three seasons were titled At the Movies, a title also used for the 1982-1990 program (which Siskel and Ebert starred in until 1986) and 2011's Ebert Presents: At the Movies.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The initial idea kicked around by WTTW that evolved into Sneak Previews was a weekly magazine devoted to the arts, hosted by Ebert, which would have sort of a Wheel Program structure, where he'd look at new works in a different field every week (music one week, theatre the next, etc.) with a critic from each field. Part of the rotation would be film, and Siskel would join Ebert for that. Finally, they decided to just make it a film review show with those two.
  • The "Yes/No" ratings on Sneak Previews that evolved into the ''Thumbs-up"/"Thumbs-down" scale used on their later shows were originally going to be "Pass" or "Fail", until it was decided it was unfair to brand all the movies they didn't recommend as "failures", since many fell into the So Okay, It's Average category and were respectable, just not quite good enough. Also, before they went with the simple binary rating system, Gene and Roger first proposed they just use their star ratings from their newspaper reviews, but the producers felt that since there wasn't a universal standard for starred reviews (they both used a four-star scale, but some critics use five), new viewers would be confused. Using letter grades was also kicked around, but rejected for being too ambiguous in the middle of the scale (for example, could C+ be considered positive or negative?), and for possibly leading new viewers to flip the channel on the show, wrongly thinking it was some sort of dull PBS educational program.
  • The duo wasn't able to review every single movie each year; not only was there not enough time, but some movies weren't screened for critics. It would've been very interesting to see them review movies such as It's Pat, Top Dog, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It, among many others; they even doubled back to Batman: Mask of the Phantasm post-release and lamented not getting its screener during its brief theatrical run, as they wound up preferring it to the live-action offerings. The studio practice of not screening movies for critics was eventually addressed on the program with the "Wagging Finger of Shame".
  • During their review of Air Bud, Siskel criticized the jerk dads in the stands, the first coach, and the abusive owner of Old Blue, saying that male authority figures are consistently portrayed badly in the movies. He suggested that he and Roger ought to do a special show about it, arguing that if they made a list of every instance, it could fill a show. They never got around to making such an episode, though.
  • Obviously, if Gene didn't die in 1999. It would've been interesting to hear his opinion on the movies of the 2000s. The final episode Siskel was alive for had a teaser for a Breakout Stars episode.
  • Both Sneak Previews and Ebert & Roeper featured a brief segment where the duo did mini-reviews of other movies opening that week that they didn't feel merited full discussions. This practice was not done on the 1986-1999 Siskel and Ebert, which is a shame because there are tons of movies that were never featured in that era.
  • Siskel and Ebert had been slated to guest host The Pat Sajak Show, but the series was canceled two weeks before their slated fill-in date. S&E hosting a talk show had all sorts of fascinating possibilities that unfortunately never saw the light of day.
  • There was talk of a sitcom called Best Enemies, which would either have had Siskel and Ebert starring as themselves, or with actors playing fictionalized versions of them, but it never came to fruition.
• Working Title: Their initial Chicago show went into production as Opening Friday..., before being changed to Opening Soon...at a Theater Near You.

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